Responsive democracy and commercial media

In an election over two policies, public mood swings whereby voters move ideologically towards a particular policy should never hurt its electoral performance. We find that this fundamental monotonicity property of preference aggregation cannot be guaranteed in the presence of a commercial media. When such a media outlet supplies news about policy-relevant uncertainty, mood swings affect demand for information. This in turn alters news quality, changing interim preferences and votes that can crowd out the ideological gain of the favored policy.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).